Aphyosemion Australe Gold killish

The new year starting with so many promising developments and project/plans it's hard to decide where to start. I'll start with a side project I started. The Australe gold killifish.
I used to breed these wonderful fish 13-14 years ago with great success so I have gone back to these fish.
I obtained 40 eggs of which I raised around 20 to maturity.

These now lay 150-300 eggs a day depending on when I've done water change, how many feeds a day etc.

 I've started by hand collecting eggs from mops and placing on top of wet peat and doing this for a week into same container. Checking daily to remove dead eggs. Alot of time goes into collecting,  frustrating and time consuming that it is its still relaxing :)
And the kids sometimes help using scissors to scoop the eggs (I just use my fingers). Maybe they'll follow in my footsteps as a breeder lol.

Now my first batches are growing after a few mishaps with toddler tipping container of 300+ fry into angel tank.  Yeh not impressed lol. Now I've got some growing up and cpl hundred fry and lots more eggs.

5-1-15

     Trialling a new method of keeping the eggs till hatching.  The goal is to not have to rely on fish laying in peat or collecting off mops. The eggs in the following pic are a week old, kept on synthetic material, kids old school uniform to be exact, that has been soaked in apple cider vinegar. The aim is not to use meth blue etc.....as I don't have meth blue on hand and it's expensive here....till I do something about it. Anyway, so far no fungused eggs. Can see a cpl infertile. We'll see if they (can) hatch in a weeks time. I know potassium permanganate is a bad idea.....hardens the eggs so they can't hatch!!!

Feed time. They get fed bs in morning and afternoon (collected day before and kept fresh in fridge) and a serve of microworms, usually just dunk the lid into tank like I did here.

Back to the bs, I usually only give fresh live shrimp to fry that's up to about 5 days. After that they get the leftovers from the fridge. That's handy because your able to collect  half the bs, feed the new fry the fresh then put the rest in the fridge to give multiple feeds through the day to the older fry, then collect the rest to feed youngest fry of an afternoon and for the others next morning. 

10-01-16

Yeh the apple cider vinegar didn't work. After eggs looking as if they were developing they must've pickled. Wet them and they fungused over next couple days. Guess I'm going to have to get some methylene blue.

31-1-2016

These guys almost sellable size. Males easy to tell from around 1.5cm. All looking for food at bottom.

A cpl of the largest males I've taken out. Put them into a 4ft with clown loaches, barbatus Cory, cardinals, penguins and (I think) red blue Columbians. A bit skittish when the larger speed freak tetras feed.

Feeding allround. 2nd and 3rd batches growing well. Not really collecting at moment.  Only once a week. When they've hatched I just chucking into a green water tank outside and feeding bs. What lives is what lives.

Pic below is one that's just hatched taken with my 2x macro mobile phone lens I got.

Meth blue crystal on its way....small fortune for 1kg (10gm/ltrs for standard solution =lifetime worth)

Enough meth blue crystal to make 100 ltrs 1% solution :)